Criminal Laws

I think capital punishment it's a fair instrument to reduce criminality , because there are some crimes that can't be paid with money or imprisonment. But, there's a very good argument that can't be ignored: the human right to live. No race, no country, no age, no culture, nothing you do in your life, can take your life away. Some people's opinion in a trial can't decide to take away somebody's life, no matter how bad its behavoir was.

I think the only pro that capital punishment have is to reduce criminality and literally to eliminate the "bad people" from the society, considering this argument, of course, in the suposition of they can't change and regret. And the contras can be related to the human rights, the capacity to change, the option to regret and there's always the posibility to punish the wrong person, and in this particular case, the punishment can't be undone.

The principal thing the government should do is to improve the education, principally in the most vulnerable sectors of the society. That's the way the young people can qualify themselves and can be better prepared to get a job and keep it.

Conected with this is the jobs deficiency, that it's growing everyday. The government should invest in creating new job spots, principally to young people, and make the big companies commit with this cause, creating laws that support this propose. I think the lack of jobs is the principal cause of criminal existence, and the criminality rates are increasing because of the financial crisis, that caused the bankrupts and multiple fires in the job market.

Luckily, I've never been a victim of a crime that I could notice at the time. I mean, I was a victim of pick-pocketing, but I didn't notice until I got home.

What to do and where to go in Santiago.

The classical place that tourists should visit is the city center, where they can find all the old buildings, museums, tipical restaurantes and bars. But I think there's a lot more than that en Santiago, like cultural centers, "picadas", and of course, the places that are far from the center, with a natural enviroment and country activities. Clearly, if someone picks Santiago as a place to visit, maybe he or she is nor interested in this things.

If a person visit a new city, he or she should know all about living in that place. So I think a tourist must travel in the subway, in the buses of transantiago, drink a "terremoto", eat a "sopaipilla" in the street, buy some stuff at Santa Lucía's fair and look up Santiago from the top of San Cristóbal's hill.

In the first place, I would recomend to visit a place called "Pancho Causeo", in Estación Central. It's a tipical restaurant, with deliciuos and tradicional food and drinks, and it's served by a family, all of them very kind, humble and warm.

To take another sight of chilean society, I would recomend to visit Cousiño's Palace, it's a beautifull and well preserved place, that shows the style of life of one of the ancient richer families in the country.

Another place they should visit is the Bellavista's Neighborhood, with all of the cultural places -including Neruda's House-, bars and place to dance and do some karaoke.

In the other hand, for some knowledge of the place they're visiting, I should recomend to go to the very very center... the "Plaza de Armas", and goto to the Historical Museum, the Catholic Cathedral, the Post Office and the town hall.

In the last place, if they want to know some nice places to take a coffe or rest a little, a suggest to go to Lastarria's neighborhood. It isn't very large or spectacular, but it's worth visiting it.

Education.

My high school experience wasn't bad, but there's lot of things that I've would change, starting on the segregation system. My school was very small, so in third year of high school, everyone had to choose two subjects of widespread curriculum and one of art subjects. The three subjects that had most of the votes were chosen for the whole course. This system works this way because the school didn't have the money to afford two teachers at the same time.

In my case, my classmates chose specialty maths, specialty biology and plastic arts. I've always preffered the humanistic subjects so I was very lost out for this decision. The only subject I liked was plastic arts, and it was one of my favourites, with history, english and language, because we could choose lot of specialtys, like dance, theater, photography, slide-work, painting, etcetera. I chose photography and I learnt a lot in this subject, starting in laboratory issues -like working with red lights, chemical substances and all that stuff- and ending in digital retouches. I think this was one of the subjects that included the most the technological issue to the everyday classroom work. Also, the teacher was exceptional. She is a highly gifted person -no kidding-, she knew art history and theory, she manage deeply every kind of art that she offer to specialize with and she knew a little bit of every subject... we could ask her for anything and she had a thuthful and accurate answer.

It's a shame I can't write like this about other teachers I had. People like her are exceptional and founding teachers dedicated and happy with what they do it's very hard.

I think that the influence of her and my history teacher was very important to make my decision when I finish high school. My school don't have a good level educationally speaking, but it's very recognized by the importance of moral and value field, so I think this is the principal issue that determinates the choices of every girl that graduates from my school. Isn't casual that the majority of the graduates study pedagogy, social work or law, all of this professions involve high level of values and social conscience.

I think my ideas in the way to improve education doesn't contribute anything new to the varied range of ideas and posibilities that the educational world have proposed already, and students specially. The usual stuff: centralize administration, taking away the manage of town councils; stop and eradicate private education; make public all kind of education, specially superior one; improve the quality of pedagogies colleges; incentivate good students for being teachers, etcetera. In this line, I think the responsability of everyone's own education is shared. A big part of the responsability belongs to the educational authorities -ministry, goverment, town councils, schools- and also a big part belongs to families and students themselves. There are people that graduates from very bad qualified schools , but they can sort selection tests very well and they can obtain scholarships, but this cases are very rare. The educational system is working wrong and all social world have to make something to make it right.

I don't know the meaning of the saying "when the student is ready the teacher appears", but I think it's related to the responsability that every student has in order to care about what he or she learn and how he or she does it. When the student accept the responsabilities and take part of its own education, the teacher can do its work.